Wild garlic bread isn’t a picnic blanket staple, exactly. This is something we did during the foraging and wild-cooking part of my bushcraft training day a couple of weeks ago.
Dampers are a classic campfire food, only we jazzed ours up a bit. You’ll need a long stick with a pointy end for cooking – not a skewer, something a bit more substantial.
Ingredients:
Bread flour
Water
Wild garlic
I can’t tell you quantities. Mix enough bread flour with enough water to make a nice, slightly sticky, dough. We did this in individual single use plastic cups so use a bowl or cup from your camp kitchen. We mixed using our pointy cooking sticks. You want enough dough to roll into a sausage a bit thinner than your average banger and maybe twice as long. Maybe not quite that long.
When you’ve mixed the dough, add in your wild garlic. Unlike the bulbs you buy at the supermarket, you use the leaves with wild garlic. One leaf will be more than enough for one damper. Either tear it into small pieces – the smaller the better, you might not want to be chewing great big bits of leaf in your bread – or chew it up and put the mush in your dough.
Mix the leaf right into the dough. When it’s done, shape it into a sausage with your hands and wind it around the pointy end of your stick. Make sure the ends of the dough are wound round and stuck back on the dough or it’s likely to fall off the stick.
Hold your wild garlic bread over the fire until it’s cooked. Try not to scorch it, otherwise you’ll end up with a blackened mass of charcoal on the outside and a gooey uncooked mess on the inside. The white ashes are much hotter than the flames and much less likely to leap up and injure you. You’ll need to be patient. You might even want to build a little tripod to leave it cooking without wearing our your arms. Be sure to turn it regularly.
When it’s cooked, eat it! If you’re really lucky, it might just slide off the stick. If you left out the garlic, this is a good point at which to slop a bit of jam down the middle of your spiral, or any other favourite sandwich topping. If it doesn’t come off the stick, just eat round it or do as I do and tear chunks off.
Variation: I’ve never tried this but it was recommended to add a big helping of sugar back in the dough stage instead of garlic to make a crispy sweetbread.